Let's take a minute to appreciate just how well this all worked out.The playoff was supposed to diminish the regular season, but instead we got passionate debate, huge games and high drama on a weekly basis.

The playoff was supposed to undermine conference titles, but instead we saw the one Power 5 league without a championship game miss out on a shot at a national title.

The doubters suggested the playoff would only serve to give undeserving teams a chance to win it all, but instead Ohio State -- a team that may well have finished fifth or sixth in the final polls under the old system -- not only won it all, but proved it was no fluke...

Bill Hancock, executive director of the CFP, said Ohio State was clearly the No. 4 team.

"All votes are taken confidentially, and about three dozen votes were taken every meeting. Teams are considered in groups no smaller than three. An 8-4 vote would not be possible under the committee's protocol."

Briles has been critical of the selection committee since the Bears were left out of the playoff.

"I think the committee needs to be a little more regionalized with people that are associated with the south part of the United States," Briles said the day after the final rankings were revealed. "I'm not sure if there's a connection on there that is that familiar with the Big 12 Conference. To me, that's an issue."

After going 11-1 during the regular season, the Bears fell to Michigan State in the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic...

Despite efforts by ESPN to move the 2015 College Football Playoff semifinals to Jan. 2, CFP executive director Bill Hancock says the games will be played on Dec. 31 as scheduled.

"The folks at ESPN understandably said 'Will you consider moving to Jan. 2 for this year?' and then reverting back to the schedule we set up two-and-a-half years ago," Hancock told Alabama Media Group on Tuesday. "This year's ratings were not a part of it, but the fact they saw an opportunity on Saturday was understandable. We established a new tradition and we had one year of it; why change for one year?"

In its first year of existence, the College Football Playoff semifinals on Jan. 1 did monster numbers for ESPN.

ESPN pitched the College Football Playoff switching the semifinals to Jan. 2, a Saturday, as a one-time deal to maximize ratings and allow "for a more accessible, fan-and participant-friendly experience for all," according to an ESPN spokesperson.

"There are lots of moving parts to this," Hancock said. "The other games that might have been played on Jan. 2--where would those go? Most likely those would have gone to New Year's Eve. There were a lot of moving parts and we decided to keep what we had."

Conference officials, including presidents and athletic directors, spent part of Thursday afternoon discussing whether the Big 12 should designate a single team as champion to the College Football Playoff selection committee in the event of a tie.

Last season, Baylor and TCU deadlocked for the league title and were presented as co-champions to the committee. Baylor fans and officials pointed to a 61-58 regular-season win and suggested the Bears should have gotten the nod over TCU. Big 12 by-laws said otherwise.

“I think there’s a recognition that we don’t want to be different in two ways than everybody else, that is to stay not having a championship game and not having a definitive way to determine our champion,” commissioner Bob Bowlsby said.

Bowlsby still believes in the concept of co-champions. He noted more kids get to celebrate and more schools get to feel good about a season.

There’s also a downside.

“It doesn’t fit as neatly as some would like within the CFP structure, and that’s what we talked about,” Bowlsby said.

The Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12 and ACC had one clear football champion. The Big 12 did not, although its impact on the conference not having a representative in the CPF remains unclear...

“I’m not hearing the drum within our business,” Hancock said in a report by AL.com. “I’m hearing it from journalists. I think we need to give this a chance. It’s such a remarkable new innovation for the game. There is no talk in our group of expanding.”

In an interview with Chris Low of ESPN.com, Gary Patterson of TCU, along with Baylor one of the two teams snubbed by the CFP committee, discussed his ideas for improving on the current four-team playoff model. One of those ideas is to push the playoff field to six teams, and his reasoning is sound: “t makes no sense to have four playoff spots and then have five [power] conferences.”

With the six-team plan, the Power Five conferences would all be guaranteed a spot in the field, with the final spot going to an at-large team — either a Power Five or Group of Five team, whichever the committee selected. The top two seeds would get byes for the opening round of play the first weekend of December and… wait, aren’t the conference championship games played that weekend?

Of course they are, and this is where Patterson’s plan flies completely off the rails: he wants the other Power Five conferences to ditch their title games.

“I think you would probably make more money on the playoff games in December than you would with the conference championship games,” Patterson said. “Other than the SEC, there were a lot of empty seats that I saw at those conference championship games. The teams playing on New Year’s would have basically the same amount of time to get ready, and you wouldn’t take away from everybody’s recruiting or interfere with final exams.”

Patterson, Low writes, “said he plans to pitch his idea this spring at the Big 12 meetings and hopefully get some conversation going about it nationally.”

For a variety of reasons -- namely money, scheduling, academics, facilities and recruiting -- the path to the College Football Playoff is simply easier for some Power 5 coaches and nearly impossible for others...

EASIEST COACHING PATHS TO THE PLAYOFF8. GeorgiaThe Bulldogs have owned the state, and while Florida has to contend with FSU (and dreadful facilities), Georgia has had the upper hand in the series against Georgia Tech. Everything is in place for a title run.

9. AlabamaThe program oozes money and tradition, luring the best players in the country. It's ranked low because of a grueling SEC West schedule and conference title game to navigate through.

10. LSUMuch like Alabama, the Tigers are the epitome of SEC success, able to cherry-pick recruits and pay for the best coaches in the country. The biggest obstacle is LSU's own conference schedule.

MOST DIFFICULT COACHING PATHS TO THE PLAYOFF

1. VanderbiltThere's no school in the country with more of an uphill battle to the playoff than Vandy. The stringent academic requirements are a big reason the program can't recruit the elite athletes necessary to compete with the top teams in the league -- which is why it never will.

9. KentuckyThe program has made a renewed financial commitment recently and has demonstrated that bowl eligibility is a reality, but Kentucky has to win the SEC East before it can be taken seriously as a playoff contender...

One of the biggest complaints about the college football postseason is the idea there are too many bowl games that nobody particularly cares about. What if those so-called meaningless bowl games were given a purpose? What if, for example, the winners of the New Mexico Bowl and the Las Vegas Bowl were given a chance later in the bowl season to compete in a third bowl game, whether in an existing bowl or in a brand new game in the lead-up to the College Football Playoff national championship game? Basketball does it with the NIT. Think of this as college football’s NIT.

I personally think the bowl system is fine the way it is, but if you are looking for a way to spice things up a little bit, and perhaps drive up television ratings for some of the lower-tier bowl games, why not give it a little more meaning? The College Football Playoff recorded monster television ratings. Implementing this sort of idea may not come close to rivaling that kind of viewership, but it could give the casual fan a little more interest in the GoDaddy Bowl or Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl ...

At least 14 cities are considering whether to bid for the 2018, 2019 or 2020 College Football Playoff championship games, sources told ESPN.

Of the 14, seven already have decided to bid. Atlanta; Charlotte; Jacksonville, Florida; South Florida; Minneapolis and San Antonio will bid, sources told ESPN, while the Associated Press reported that Santa Clara, California, also will bid.

The deadline to turn in the College Football Playoff's request for proposal for the championship games is late May.

The Rose Bowl, which did not bid for any of the first three championship games, is undecided whether it will bid on the 2019 or 2020 title games.

While nothing is official as of yet, commissioner Bob Bowlsby appears fairly confident that his bosses will adopt a tie-breaker procedure that would allow the league to present to the CFP committee, ahem, “One True Champion.” Athletic directors from the conference will meet in Kansas City this Thursday, and Bowlsby believes that what is likely a vast majority of conference members are in favor of declaring one champ when it comes to football.

“We probably don’t want to be different in more than one way than the other conferences.” Bowlsby told Chuck Carlton of the Dallas Morning News. “We need to have some other way to determine a champion.”

As every member of the 10-school Big 12 plays each other in conference play, the tiebreaker would be very straightforward: if two teams are tied for the top spot at the end of the season, the team that won the head-to-head matchup would officially be declared as the conference’s One True Champion.

This means the College Football Playoff selection committee will continue to release a weekly ranking in the second half of the year, giving fans a chance to see how teams are faring against each other in the eyes of the selection committee based on results to date. This is one part fo the system that received the most criticism in 2014, and it should be expected to once again be the biggest problem with the presentation of the CFB Playoff in 2015.

The premise of the weekly rankings is simple; to provide an overview of the current thought process of the selection committee as far as the top teams in college football are concerned. The problem is it creates debates where none are needed, because nothing is ultimately decided in the third week of October, when there are so many games left to play. Some people take it more seriously than others, so how much stock you put in a late October ranking is up to you. Just ask Ohio State how much those rankings really matter. Or Baylor and TCU.

"I was told the reason we had a (selection) committee is we were going to take all that stuff out of it. (Conference) championship games shouldn't have mattered," Patterson said.

"Their job was to watch all this film and pick the four best teams no matter who you played, what you did. All the sudden it came down to, 'Well, they played a championship game but they didn't.' That's not what we were told. We were told they were going to pick the four best teams."

“I feel pretty strongly about four now because I thought that the rivalry weekend — that Saturday after Thanksgiving — almost felt like a play-in game,” Rice said to Heather Dinich of ESPN.com. “Now the Iron Bowl, Alabama has to beat Auburn. You could imagine the circumstances in another year where the Civil War, Oregon really has to beat Oregon State.”I agree that if it got much larger, I don’t think you would have that momentum coming out of the regular season, so it’s the best possible scenario.”

Despite its first year’s hits (massive TV ratings) and misses (weekly ranking debates and the Big 12 conversation), Rice feels confident four is still the right number for college football.

“I agree that if it got much larger, I don’t think you would have that momentum coming out of the regular season, so it’s the best possible scenario,” Rice added.

MetLife Stadium spokesperson told ESPN that New York/New Jersey will not bid on the 2018, 2019 or 2020 college football championship games. Orlando also has decided not to bid on the next three available title games because it is targeting the next cycle of championship games beginning in 2021.. at least six cities/communities remain undecided: Arlington, Texas; Detroit; Houston; Indianapolis; New Orleans; and Pasadena, California...

Sources said seven cities/communities have decided to bid on the 2018-20 title games: Atlanta; Charlotte; Jacksonville, Florida; South Florida; Minneapolis, San Antonio; and Santa Clara, California.

The CFP will announce which cities bid to host the games by the end of May, with the three championship sites expected to be announced in October.

The next two title games will be held at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on Jan. 11, 2016, and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, on Jan. 9, 2017.

The 2018 title game will be preceded by semifinal games at the Rose (Pasadena, California) and Sugar (New Orleans) bowls. The 2019 title game will feature semifinals at the Orange (Miami) and Cotton (Arlington, Texas) bowls. And the 2020 title game will have semifinals at the Fiesta (Glendale, Arizona) and Peach (Atlanta) bowls...

With the NCAA soon expected to deregulate conference championship games, the Big 12 would be free to add a title game by 2016. But whether the Big 12 should add a conference championship game is a divided issue for the league's coaches.

"I've always favored the conference championship game, and I still do," Kansas State coach Bill Snyder said Tuesday during the Big 12 spring teleconference. "The playoffs have muddied the water a little bit. So I understand both sides of the argument."

Under current NCAA rules, conferences must have 12 teams and two divisions to hold a championship game. But CBSSports.com reported earlier this month that championship game deregulation is expected to pass, which would allow the Big 12 to potentially add a title game for 2016.

The Big 12 is the only Power 5 conference without a championship game, because of its nine-game round-robin format. But given that Big 12 co-champions Baylor and TCU were left out of the playoff last season, the possibility of bringing back a conference title game is sure to be a topic of discussion when the league's coaches and athletic directors meet in Phoenix next month...